SPP 2020: Cyclic deterioration of High-Performance Concrete in an experimental-virtual lab

Extensive advances in concrete technology have led to the development of high performance concretes with significantly expanded application possibilities. Examples include self-compacting, high-strength and ultra-high-strength concretes with steel-like strengths or fiber-reinforced and textile-reinforced concretes with highly ductile behavior. These concretes allow very slender, aesthetic and resource efficient concrete structures, which are more susceptible to vibration due to their reduced weight. Even outside of the classical construction industry, the range of applications for high-performance concretes will undergo considerable development, for example in mechanical and plant engineering, where they can become an alternative to metallic and ceramic materials. All of these structures are subjected to highly cyclical loading, so that the fatigue behavior is crucial for their design and thus for the feasibility of innovative concrete applications. However, there is any basic knowledge of material degradation of concrete under fatigue stress hardly available. Because of these gaps in knowledge, the use of modern high-performance concretes is already considerably hindered, sometimes even prevented.The designed aim of this priority program is to capture, understand, describe, model and predict the material degradation of high-performance concretes using the newest experimental and virtual numerical methods. Since the damage processes occur on a very small scale, they cannot be entirely observed during the load tests. The recording of suitable damage indicators during the experiments make the time-consuming fatigue tests already very demanding. To this extent, the desired results will be developed from a close cooperation between the building material science and the computational mechanics knowledge, which is the interconnection of experiment and computation in the Experimental-Virtual-Lab.An SPP is the perfect framework to resolve the pressing issues of material degradation across locations. The collaboration is designed in such a way that in addition to an intensive exchange of experimental techniques, damage indicators and modeling approaches, a multiple use of the experimental data and a close interaction between experiment and simulation is achieved. Due to the complex experimental technique and the necessity of a fundamental further development of material models, a strong cooperation of the participating locations is promoted with special structural arrangements. Only in this way the existing barriers to the use of fatigue-stressed high-performance concretes can be overcome and an innovation boost for building with concrete and for concrete applications outside of the classical construction industry can be triggered. The new knowledge will also enable to extend the service life of existing fatigue-stressed structures such as bridges and wind turbines.

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